It’s been about 8 months since I got my 2019 Mac Pro which retails at a massive $15,000,
and it’s been doing a killer job editing videos in pure silence thanks to the excellent
cooling system, but now that I’ve spent a few weeks with Apple’s new 2020 5K iMac,
it performs so well I started to wonder if I even need it anymore.
In fact, we are building a home and I need as much cash as possible so if this $3500
iMac can get close to the performance of my Mac Pro for the tasks that I do every day,
then I’m definitely gonna sell it and pocket about 10 grand which will be perfect for a
nice home theater setup.
We’ll be looking at a wide variety of uses such as Logic Pro, X code, Photo editing with
Photoshop and Lightroom, Video editing, gaming, and much more.
I’ll tell you up front that these tests were really eye opening, both in favor of
the Mac pro and against it and revealed a few things I’ve never known before which
are going to change the way I’ll recommend computers forever, and that's not clickbait.
I also highly recommend buying an ultra soft premium max tech shirt or one of these comfortable
masks which support our channel!
First, here are the full specs of each Mac. The Mac Pro has 2 extra cores but they are
an older design and run slower then the iMacs but will present a few surprises. My Pro has
the Vega II graphics card with 32GB of video memory compared to the 5700XT with 16GB in
the iMac. You can also get a W5700X in the Mac Pro for a fair bit less than my Vega 2
and it's a newer design but has less raw power and half the memory that runs slower.
We also have a huge difference in RAM, 64GB vs 192GB which I’ll show you why it doesn’t
matter. Lastly my Mac Pro has the $2000 afterburner card which accelerates ProRes and ProRes raw.
The Mac Pro comes in at about $15 grand but I bought ram myself bringing it down to $13,000
which is still almost 4 times the cost of the iMac which was $3540 if you buy ram yourself
and follow our ram install guide which you absolutely should do, I’ll link it below.
Along with that, the 5K iMac comes with a gorgeous 5K display that costs $1300 to add
to the Mac Pro.
Now there's more to this story such as Ports, cooling, upgradability and more but let's
save that for later and jump into performance.
Starting with the good ol Geekbench that tests a wide variety of tasks, the iMacs wins in
single core due to its faster frequency but in multi-core the Pro scores closer to 30%
higher.
Now putting a consistent 100% CPU load on all cores in Cinebench R20 which is a 3D rendering
benchmark the i9 iMac shockingly beats out the Mac Pro by just over 100 points even though
it has 2 less cores. Looking deeper the results make sense because
the Mac Pro runs at 3.6Ghz under full load and the iMac at 4Ghz which is overall faster,
and it actually uses about 150 watts to achieve the faster speed instead of 170, but it also
runs much hotter and also loud instead of silent.
As for graphics, geekbench’s metal graphics test resulted in the Mac scoring just over
65% higher in raw graphics performance which is a big difference as it should be for a
graphics card that cost almost as much as the whole iMac, but hold on because real world
performance will be interesting.
Looking at another graphics test, this time gaming with Unigine Heaven, here instead of
a 65% difference, the Mac Pro’s Vega 2 is only 18% faster which is a huge improvement.
That’s because the latest AMD RDNA graphics have lots of improvement outside of raw power.
They’re great for gaming and a few other things as you’ll notice.
The Mac Pro is the fastest Mac for games and can even handle some 6K gaming, the 5k iMac
is almost as good while being a fraction of the price.
Graphics are also great for 3D rendering, which we used blender to test and here the
difference was even smaller, about 7% and only about 1 min faster to render the BMW
and Classroom scenes which is very interesting.
Let's get into some more common uses like Photo editing. Using lightroom both are extremely
smooth and fast while editing. To be honest, I couldn’t notice any difference. I exported
500 42MP edited raw images which maxes out the CPU, so I expected the results to be close,
but what I saw was shocking.. (AD)
The Mac Pro was practically twice as fast. These results made no sense since cinebench
was faster on the iMac. I searched through everything to find a bottleneck and surprisingly
it wasn’t the RAM and it wasn’t the SSD. After hours of testing and researching we
figured out that the reason the Mac pro is so much faster is its six channel memory instead
of dual channel.
The base iMac Pro is slower in every way then the 5K iMac and has half the ram yet it was
about in between the Mac Pro and iMac in terms of performance, and it uses 4 channel memory
which is also right in the middle.
Onto photoshop, once again I can’t tell a single difference when doing my normal work,
but we ran the PugetBench Photoshop mixed benchmark and the Mac Pro smoked the iMac
5K. I’m betting it’s once again because of the 6 channel memory instead of dual channel.
With that said they trade blows in certain tasks so pause this video to see the detailed
breakdowns.
Before some shockers in logic Pro and X code, let’s touch on something that we do on the
daily and that's video editing. I’ll be doing a detailed review including Premiere
Pro and Davinci resolve tests in a dedicated video on my Filmmaking channel which is linked
below but here I’ll focus on Final Cut.
Running BruceX which tests final cut graphics rendering the iMac Smoked the Mac Pro taking
just 6 seconds which is shocking. There's certain things that this 5700 is just so much
faster at. The same thing goes for stabilizing 4K HEVC footage, where the iMac was 65% faster
at.
The Mac Pro’s vega 2 graphics have older decoders so that's what's holding it back
not the raw performance. It’s important to note that you can get a W5700X in the Mac
Pro as well which will match up in these tests, but will be slower than the Vega 2 in some
of the tougher ones coming up.
Next I exported 2 5min sample projects with multiple effects, the first being common 4K
H.264 and the second being H.265 and in both cases the Mac Pro was faster.
I then exported one of our youtube videos which is 12 min long with tons of graphs and
effects *the gap closed up, because just like in Bruce X when your GPU has a ton of effects
to render the newer graphics are more efficient.
By the way all of these numbers are using the latest version of Final Cut which has
changed some of the results from before. Getting into tougher tests like Canon RAW, the Mac
Pro is still super fast for this taking just 5min but the iMac isn’t too far behind.
As far as editing smoothness the Mac Pro can handle 4K 60 RAW with effects perfectly with
overhead for more effects where the iMac can barely handle 4K 60 with a lut at full resolution,
but still that's enough for most C200 editors who usually work in 24 or 30FPS timelines.
Moving on to RED RAW using new Metal decoding the Mac Pro can play back this really compressed
8K almost perfectly in an 8K timeline while the iMac is just a few FPS behind and both
are limited by graphics not CPU’s.
Rendering the projects I was shocked to see that the Mac Pro was actually slower at exporting
my 4.5K RED RAW test by just a few seconds and for the 8K project exporting to 4K the
iMac was actually 22% faser which is crazy.
If you had the cheaper W5700X in the Mac Pro it would match the iMac here but would be
slightly less smooth when actually editing.
The new Canon R5 is very popular but its 422 footage is tough to edit so many will transcode.
The MacPro can convert 30 min of 4K 10-bit in 30min while the iMac takes 37min. Surprisingly
when editing in the timeline the iMac is actually smoother.
With that exporting a 5min project is actually more than a min faster using the iMac than
the Mac Pro because the CPU can run faster at 5Ghz which is another thing I didn’t
expect.
My Mac Pro does have something the iMac will never get, The $2000 afterburner card that
decodes ProRes and ProRes RAW so the CPU doesn’t have to.
It's important to note it won’t help transcoding since it can’t encode ProRes but in cases
when you’re going from one flavor of ProRes to another like this 4K ProRes RAW project
to 4K there's a noticeable speed difference since the CPU can focus solely on encoding.
The results are similar testing 8K Prores RAW to 8K ProRES where the afterburner equipped
Pro is significantly faster but if you don’t ditch out $2 grand for this extra card the
iMac is just as fast as the Mac Pro.
As far as playback the iMac can handle 1 stream of 8K ProRes RAW in an 8K project perfectly
smooth exactly like this Mac Pro without afterburner but neither can do more than that.
With Afterburner my mac Pro can do 4 streams of 8K, or 16K ProRES RAW which is something
this iMac will never do so if you’ll need the afterburner or the ability to buy up to
a 28 core or 4 graphics card you’ll only get that in the Mac Pro.
Overall for the vast majority of people the 5K iMac with 5700XT is rounding up to be an
amazing bargain for video editing. In Some cases it’s faster than my Mac pro and when
it’s slower the difference isn’t drastic.
Now what about Logic Pro X and X Code? Well the results will surprise you. (AD)
The iMac could handle 125 tracks before shutting down in our Logic benchmark which is really
respectable and enough for most people and I expected the Mac pro to be similar but it
handled up to 227 tracks once again probably because of memory bandwidth.
The results were similar in our custom X-Code benchmark where the Mac Pro was almost twice
as fast even though this test maxes out the CPU on both. Unlike Logic though, the iMac
Pro was slower than the iMac for Xcode so I can’t say it’s a memory bandwidth limitation
but the Mac Pro sure is fast for compiling code.
Overall for performance, this i9 5700XT iMac is more than enough for most people, even
professionals, and is much much faster than just a few years ago. With that said the iMac
does excel if you’re pushing it to the extremes and for compiling code and exporting photos
its much quicker. And for some people that might be doing a ton of that on the daily,
it would be worth spending 3 to 5 times as much depending on the config and monitor price.
With that the Mac Pro is also deal silent where the iMac will sound like a hair dryer
in many of these tests, which does get annoying but if most of your time is spent editing
photos and video and not constantly rendering, then it stays mostly quiet.
The Mac pro also has 12 thunderbolt ports instead of 4, dual 10Gbe ethernet, and is
expandable in the future so if you like keeping your machine for many years that's a definite
plus. For example, I could upgrade the graphics card right now and get some of those speed
improvements, where the imac is sealed so it will last you longer.
On the flip side, iMacs hold their value so well that it might actually be cheaper to
upgrade every few years to the latest and greatest instead of holding onto a Pro for
10 years where the value will go from $15,000 to just a few. I just sold my 2017 iMac and
it cost me $1200 to own it for 3 years so you can do the math.
With all of the testing done the iMac Pro does in fact get very close to the Mac pro
in the daily professional tasks that I do, and it’s actually is faster for editing
my Canon R5 footage. With that said the Mac Pro is going to be put up for sale, so if
you’re in the states and interested in a great deal on one, let me know down below.
Make sure to use our links down below if you’re buying an iMac and use our RAM upgrade guide
to save up to $2100, and if you love our videos support us by buying a sweet ultra soft apple
product shirt, mask or any of the other cool stuff in that merch shelf.
This has been Max, subscribe for our full final review of the 2020 5K iMac and I’ll
see you in the next video!